


All That We've Fought For

by b0necharmed



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 22:32:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11300187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b0necharmed/pseuds/b0necharmed
Summary: Takes place a couple of years after the events of the first game, in which Corvo encounters difficulties in the keeping of a dream journal. Sort of. There's sex dreams, and then actual sex, and then sex in a dream, all layered with a healthy garnish of existential angst.Sort of.





	All That We've Fought For

Corvo used to keep a journal, back when Jessamine had been alive. It hadn't been his idea. He'd grown up on the streets of Karnaca, smelling of steel and gunpowder, having washed more blood off his fingers than smears of ink. When he'd first come to Dunwall he'd observed how much time the nobility in this great, crumbling city spent hunched at their desks, hemming and hawing over one word or another, twisting sentences into the shapes they wanted. He had no patience for any of it. None, until his gentle Empress had started leaving him letters. Notes, unsigned, left out on conspicuous tables where he could see them just walking by, with their smooth looping sentences quietly enthusing about how charming she secretly found her personal bodyguard, with his quiet manner and his dark eyes. Sometimes he would find scattered papers on the floor of royal library and he would gather them up as his ears burned red, discreetly replacing them in a neat pile on the desk they'd fallen off, their incendiary contents firmly face down. Eventually he'd bought a small leather-bound thing from a trader in the market district, palm-sized and filled with vellum that crinkled when covered it with his clumsy, slanting penmanship. He'd then lost that book somewhere in the Empress' quarters, and he could not remember how or where, of course.

Years later he would ask Jessamine for it and she would claim she'd never seen such a thing. By that time Corvo was a seasoned diarist. In a chamber reachable only by turning a specific vase in a room clockwise he wrote down in scratches of bone black all the words he could not allow his lips to form, knowing that she would read them later. "The written word is a map to guide the thoughts in your head," Jessamine used to say.

He has not written once in the three years since she died.

The sun sets now over the stubborn stones of Dunwall Tower, scattering dappled leaf-shadow across the blank ivory of an unscathed journal. Overhead, songbirds have turned the air to cacophony; somewhere in a garden below he can hear his daughter, the child Empress, shrieking with laughter as she chases one of the guards’ new puppies between the rows of hedges. It's good that she can laugh. There was a time when he thought he'd never hear her laugh again.

Corvo has taken up his pen because he has spent weeks being troubled by strange dreams. Strange dreams have become a way of life ever since he was marked, ever since he stumbled into a black sky and looked up to meet the eyes of a god. But his dreams these days are stranger than most: dreams which leave him lying confused in his bed, flushed with warring waves of heat and chill, unable to pin down coherent thought. Dreams that haunt him as he walks the polished corridors of the Tower, whispering like clouds of living smoke.

He smooths his fingers over the surface of the journal. _The written word is a map to guide the thoughts in your head._

Corvo presses the tip of his pen to paper and starts inscribing the shape of letters, the first new words he's laid down since he realised that he did not understand the world at all.

> _I am an old man, and I have seen more than I should. I have lain with the moon and tasted pleasure in the salt of the sea. I have walked with my feet among the stars; I have floated in the empty space between the atoms._
> 
> _I have looked into the Void, and found it looking back at me._

And then the pen grows heavy as a stone in his hand so he puts it down, flat on the paper between the lines of glistening ink, unable to continue.

 

* * *

 

In his dreams Corvo is fucking the Outsider. That's all there is to it: no talking, no deeper meaning, just pure sex. Limb against limb in a formless sea of desire. Maybe they're deep in the Void, maybe they're in the shallows of that rocky beach where Corvo first slipped his fingers into another boy's mouth. It doesn't really matter. The Outsider is a shapeless presence around him, not shapeless in the way a muddy stream or misty rain is shapeless, but shapeless in the way a tornado is, ripping its way through the landscape. They rut against him with the force of an explosion and the tenderness of a spring bud, and there is no sequential action here, just a collision of sensations: moon-cold skin against his belly, fingers bruise-tight around his arms, breath sharply and startling hot against his neck. In dreams it is easy to become a hundred different things at once, and in the storm of lovemaking Corvo is both the tumbling air and the stirred-up earth, but also painfully human, trapped in his body, burned to a primal knot of wanting. The Outsider never speaks or looks Corvo in the face. When he climaxes they sink their jaws into the vulnerable flesh of his neck.

Corvo wakes from these dreams in a thousand pieces that slowly coalesce into some semblance of a person. He remembers who he is and where he is and what he is not. Often he finds his marked hand numb, full of tingling needles, and while he massages it back to life the tide of sulphuric desire recedes in him, leaving behind a weight that is halfway between embarrassment and disbelief. When he gets up to look in the mirror he is disappointed to find the skin of his neck untouched.

 

* * *

 

"Corvo!"

Emily's shriek pierces the salt-thick air and Corvo leaps to his feet, mind disoriented, heart furious beneath his ribs. Where is she? A hundred feet away the waves gossip over the stones of Dunwall's shoreline. Gulls circle. No grumble of motorboat engine, or the damning sounds of struggle. Corvo has dozed off on the rocks in the suggestive lull of the midafternoon heat, and he's now paying the price. "Emily!"

He darts forward. Emily's tiny and solitary figure comes into focus at the water's edge, pointing out at the horizon. "Corvo, look!" The white hem of her coat flutters in the wind, unsullied. As he comes closer he see her cheeks are pink with excitement. "There's a whale." 

Then she looks at him and her expression shifts. "I scared you."

Corvo musses her hair with one hand as she protectively grips his other one. "What did you see, love?"

"A whale," Emily repeats, pointing again. Her fingers worm deeper into his grip and press the bones together. "I saw her fins come out of the water. They don't really come so close to Dunwall, do they, Corvo?"

"Not really." The sea appears unsettled, an endless trooping collection of soft white peaks. He sees nothing on the horizon. And then-- there, a serrated fluke breaks the water. A hint of the massive body that slides unseen beneath the waves. A sign?

Emily leans her weight against his arm. "Let's go back to Dunwall Tower. I'm tired."

"You sure?" Coming here was her idea; as the young Empress she doesn't get to leave the confines of the Tower often. Corvo had thought a bit of seabreeze might do them both good. 

"I'm sure," his daughter says, and the way she smiles up at him makes him want to sweep her up in his arms and never let her go.

On the carriage ride back, Emily leans forward and whispers to him, her face a perfect mix of fascination and seriousness: "Did you know that there's an Outsider shrine in the Tower, underneath the chapel? It's right next to where all the generators are."

Corvo tries to feign surprise. "Is there?" 

She nods. "Someone must have put it there when the Lord Regent was in charge. A lot of the palace staff go there, but in secret of course. They're quite superstitious, you know, but they've got to hide it from the Overseers. One of the kitchen boys told me."

"I see," Corvo says.

"Do you believe in the Outsider, Corvo?" His daughter has her ankles crossed and her hands clasped primly in her lap. "Miss Lewisham says it's a bunch of made-up stories and I shouldn't pay it any attention." She tilts her bright-eyed head. "But I don't understand. If they're _just_ stories, why do the Overseers care so much if people believe them or not?"

She's watching him carefully for his reaction. Corvo musters a smile: a thin, wan thing. "You shouldn't be bothering the kitchen staff, Emily. They’re busy enough.” As her face creases into a frown he adds, “And you should save questions about the Outsider for Miss Lewisham. She seems to know a lot."

 

* * *

 

That night he dreams that he swims through the oceans in the shape of a whale, swift and dark, plunging into depths unknown. The sea around him is warm as a bath and _seething_ with life. Not in the sense of being filled with tentacled creatures of the deep, but in the sense of the water being alive around him. As Corvo swims he realises it feels familiar, a miasma of ozone and dust in the corner of basements. He knows that smell, intimately. The Outsider. 

Corvo twists his multiply-finned body, sublime and gargantuan, and the ocean shudders against his patterned skin. Water sluices by as he swims, and in the dream it sounds like a hitched breath, an exhalation, a gasp heavy with longing. He tastes salt between his teeth and musk in the long hollows of his skull. Corvo dives deep and the ocean welcomes him, embracing him as he plows into its core, someplace warm and wet and red. 

This time he wakes into cold moonlight and stumbles from his bed to his writing desk, his fingers shaking as he reaches for the pen. As fragments of sentences spill from his nib Corvo steadies his marked hand against the desk's edge, nails biting into the oak. Need fills him, and he wants to pour it all onto the page, but language has become an impossible barrier between him and the state of his existence. There is fire burning through him, but he is only a man grasping at smoke.

In the morning he looks at the journal and finds that he has written, sixteen times in total, the phrase "i want to put myself so deeply inside you i cannot get out again". The words are barely legible, and he furiously scratches them out before anyone else sees.

 

* * *

 

He finds the shrine to the Outsider exactly where it should be in the basement, wreathed in cold purple light. Emily is right: a someone or someones has visited recently, cleaning the dust and cobwebs from the heavy drapes. The altar is littered with bones, finely carved and decorated with the stems of runic writing. Corvo looks at the dark stains in the cracks of the floor and realises he hasn't brought anything for the Outsider. Does he even need to? Will that asshole come if Corvo simply asks?

"Her questions are increasingly harder to answer, are they not?" 

The Outsider sits cross-legged on a jagged blade of rock above Corvo, the amorphous fingers of the Void tendriled around them. They appear more relaxed than Corvo remembers, perched in this casual way. But maybe he's projecting. Maybe he's the one who's more relaxed. The Void seems the same as ever, an endless expanse of cold lightless nothingness, welcoming as a shark's maw.

"You've been watching me. Still."

"You seem surprised."

"The crisis in Dunwall is over. The worst of the rat plague has long receded. I didn't think the small troubles of a man trying to raise his daughter would be interesting enough for you." 

"It is when the daughter is an Empress, orchestrating the fates of hundreds of thousands of souls spread across the Isles."

The Empress is twelve years old, and still screams in delight when she sees the flukes of a whale breaking the horizon. "And are we sufficiently entertaining for you?" 

The Outsider tilts their head and says nothing. Are they thinking, or silently mocking him? Are they waiting for him to speak? As though speech would come to him that easily when faced with a god?

The moment of silence stretches, and to break it Corvo lowers himself to the rough surface of black shale beneath him, mirroring the Outsider's posture. They study him, this eldritch deity, this creature of the void. Corvo focuses on his own breathing, even though he's convinced it's not strictly necessary out here.

"You don't use my gift as much as you should," the Outsider says. They gesture towards Corvo's marked hand. Their tone is smooth, lacking in spikes of emotion that Corvo could use to prise the words apart, revealing their meaning. He can't tell if they are pleased, disappointed, or merely making a statement. 

Corvo clenches his hand and the knuckles push against skin. Everything the Outsider says to him seems like some kind of a test. "I don't have much occasion to these days."

"You are a strange one," the Outsider muses. "Most would invent occasion to use the Mark, if occasion did not come to them. "

"I'm not like most," he says shortly. "I've seen what this gift of yours does to people. It seems more like a curse, if you ask me."

"A curse?" The Outsider laughs, a glacial stutter of mirth, and it strikes Corvo that it's the first time he's ever seen them laugh. A sharp, indescribable spike of emotion tears through him. A frisson, that's what they'd call it. Frisson.

With a sound like a dying breath, the Outsider dissolves into a shoal of knife shards. Before Corvo can turn around the Outsider reforms behind to him, voice soft in his ear as they catch hold of his marked hand. A prickling wave of adrenaline floods his limbs. "My dear Corvo, if it is a curse as you say, I could always take it back."

Corvo struggles to tug his hand free of the Outsider's grasp. The god smells intoxicating: an otherworldly, chemical scent from the dawn of time. Or a laboratory. Pure and primal. They whisper: "But you don't want that, do you?"

_They know._ Maybe they've been watching him in his dreams, maybe they've been sending him those dreams. But the Outsider knows. They know every unspeakable desire, every illicit image that lies in the recesses of Corvo's mind. He goes still against their cool, firm skin, air escaping from his ribcage in quick and shallow bursts.

The Outsider leans so close Corvo can feel their lips moving against the shell of his ear. "Tell me what it is you want." 

Corvo stiffens and stops breathing, terrified his body will betray him. "Just leave me alone," he manages.

 

* * *

 

In his journal Corvo writes "I want you to tell me what _you_ want". The line spills out of him swiftly, with great conviction: it feels right and true. Then he falters. He starts the next line with "I want," but he has forgotten what he was wishing for. Maybe in the first place he had nothing specific in mind. Nothing except an generalised ache of longing. He circles the words "I WANT" twice and leaves the sentence hanging.

 

* * *

 

Buried deep in the distillery district is a twist of alley intestinal enough not to have earned its own name on the map, a trough of packed mud between the stone wall of a cannery and the gnarled hoarding of an illegal shack that workers bunk in, sixteen to a room. By day it serves as a thoroughfare for those in a hurry between the mill and the pump houses; by night it is a place for gentlemen of particular inclinations to meet willing young men of certain dispositions. In parlance they call it the Wishbone Turn, but those who ply it most often don't call it anything at all. They say "the alley".

It is through the alley that Corvo pads down this night in this wet Month of Songs, mask hiding the contours of his face. He has been here twice in the past week, ghosting through the throngs of underfed young things with their open collars and canted hips and cheaply-bought smiles. The boy who's caught his eye is still there, cigarette hanging between gangly fingers as he lounges, grinning at something another boy has said. He's a little too young, his lips plump and a hint of baby fat still around the jowls. But when he turns to look at Corvo the angles of his cheekbones are exactly perfect, something in the arcane geometry of his face that sets off a strange rhythm in Corvo's chest. His hair, plastered to his forehead with the night heat, is just the right shade and cut. 

The boy notes the macabre lines of the mask, and his gaze wanders downwards to take in the fine cut of his clothes. A wolfish expression takes his face. "What can I do you for, mister?"

His voice is surprisingly and pleasingly gravelly. "Do you like getting choked?" Corvo asks.

A chorus of sniggers breaks out around them. "Won't find any better choice in the alley," says one of the boy's companions. "Likes being tied up too," says another.

The boy looks at Corvo with his lucid brown eyes and simply says, "Yes, I do."

"Do you have a room?"

"Matter of fact, I do."

The boy's name is Sebastian, and his room is several streets downriver of the alley, on the second floor of the building whose stairwells are snarled with debris and whose roof is patched in places with cheap plywood. They agree on a price on the way there. The sum would probably pay the wages of a factory worker for a week, but Corvo reasons that he can afford it. He doesn't mind.

Amidst the squalor Sebastian's room is a tiny square of scrubbed and whitewashed order. The moment they are alone Sebastian begins undressing, his movements brisk and practiced. Corvo stills the boy's hands. "Wait." He wants to do it himself, peeling off the soft layers to expose the pale skin, the wiry body. Sebastian stands pliant and approving as Corvo pulls off his coat and vest, a crooked smile resident on his face. 

Under the thin cotton of the boy's shirt Corvo finds a bonecharm on a long loop of waxed string. "Protects me from the evil eye," the boy says. "People who might harm me don't see me."

The bareness of Sebastian's room betrays no sign of Outsider worship. "Do you believe... in such things?" Corvo asks, tentatively.

"Hasn't not worked yet. 'S not going to be a problem, is it mister? You're not up with the Overseers or anything, are you?"

"It's not a problem." Corvo puts the bonecharm on the bedside table, which would give it a clear view of everything.

The boy traces a finger over the vertices of Corvo's mask. "And you'll be keeping this on, mister? I want to touch your lips."

"If I take it off, I'll have to blindfold you, in addition to tying you up. Are you sure?"

"Can't think of anything better."

So Corvo wraps silk around his eyes and rope around his wrists and kisses his soft hungry lips and then lays him down on the bed, a crumpled mound of white, like a work of art. Sculpture. With his chin tilted that way, and the blindfold... it's easy to imagine. The boy gasps when Corvo touches him; the noise pleases him. He's still imagining its someone else. He keeps his imagination going as he slides his hands over the boy's taut and yielding flesh, as he sinks his fingers in, as he gets him trembling and erect, as he undresses, as he presses himself into the boy.

He chokes Sebastian as they'd agreed. The boy's face darkens to a raw red as Corvo tightens his hands around that long, elegant neck, pushing his thumbs into the hollows of his throat. As climax rises forth in Corvo's loins the boy goes limp and twitches, his jaw falling open, his lips slack. Corvo can't stop himself. The mark on the left hand flares zinc-white as he comes.

The first thing he does when he returns to earth is check the boy's pulse. Still alive, thank the Void. And vaguely conscious-- a small smile moves the corners of his lips as he feels Corvo's fingers questing against his neck. He'd come too, at some point in their ferocious rutting. Corvo wipes the spatter off the boy's belly with a soft rag and unbinds his hands.

By the time the boy sits up and tugs the blindfold off his face, Corvo has put the mask back on. "How do you feel?" 

"Marvellous."

"Alright."

The boy arranges himself into a cross-legged position. The white of his skin is shot through with red streaks and tooth marks. He looks at Corvo's hand. "Those markings... they look familiar. I've seen them somewhere."

The Outsider's gift has burned through the cloth Corvo wrapped around it. He briskly ducks it out of sight and gets dressed. "It's nothing you should concern yourself about," he says.

Sebastian says, to Corvo's turned back, "You're welcome to return any time, mister Lord Protector."

Corvo freezes. 

"'S okay. I know who you are. I won't tell anyone."

Corvo turns slowly, the knot of anxiety in his chest turning into something sharper, something red-edged. Sebastian is gazing at him with a strange kind of earnestness, simultaneously intense and languid. It would take two seconds to silence him forever, maybe less. Corvo curls his marked hand into a fist. Nobody would investigate. Nobody would care enough.

The boy tilts his head. He suspects nothing.

Corvo buttons up his vest and puts his jacket on. He says nothing, but he leaves an additional hundred coin on the boy's table, next to the bonecharm. "Here."

"You don't have to."

"Take it anyway." 

He leaves. He doesn't come back.


End file.
